by Wil McCarthy
Around the passage’s first lazy curve there came another, sharper one in the opposite direction, and beyond that lay a thick sheet of curved glass that was part wall, part ceiling. Behind it the mountain shot up in a fist of blunt rock, the little staircase winding up it like a varicose vein, lit with periodic circles of soft wellstone light. Not jagged on the outside, this mountain, this Skadi Peak on the crown of Maxwell Montes. No, soft metals had once frosted here right out of the atmosphere’s furnace, and eons of hot, thick, corrosive wind had swept over it like ocean currents, inexorable, smoothing every contour, actually polishing in places, so that the tinned, leaded rock shone almost wetly in the twilight. What Skadi looked like, more than anything, was a cheap computer graphic, a platonic ideal of mountainness. Or perhaps a tall scoop of chocolate ice cream, just beginning to slump in summer’s heat. Here and there, patches of blue and green and butterscotch lichen interrupted the smooth silver-browns of windswept basalt.
“Door,” Bruno said to the glass, and obligingly, it opened for him, a rectangle of wellwood appearing in the glass and swinging upward on creaky, faux iron hinges. The wind swirled in at once, whistling, much thinner and less cold than he’d been expecting. He stepped through.
Beside him, Marlon Sykes noted, “You know, I’m not sure that actually seeing the fractal structure of the collapsiter will help you, particularly. You seem to have worked out the crucial insight already.”
“Yes? Well, we shall see.” He drew a deep breath, sampling, releasing it with the hint of a cough. Ernest Krogh had not exaggerated the air’s impurity—it tickled the lungs, filled them without wholly satisfying them. It reeked faintly but distinctly of sulfur. It was dry and cool and seemed to suck the moisture right out of him. It was, he thought, good enough for a mere kilometer’s hike.
“Can you breathe?” he asked Marlon.
Inhaling deeply, the Declarant nodded. “Adequately, yes.”
“Majesty?”
Tamra sniffed, wrinkled her nose, then finally nodded. “It will do, yes.”
There were others behind her, dozens of others, but he felt no need to interrogate each of them. Whatever Tamra might say, people were responsible primarily to and for themselves, and if the air displeased them they could, obviously, go back downstairs and finish their dessert.
Bruno pointed with his shoulder. “Upward, then!”
The climb commenced.
The stairs were less smooth than the rock face around them. Rough; perhaps deliberately so, though traction didn’t pose much of a problem. With the latest clothing technology a sheet of smooth glass might have served nearly as well, boot soles finding and clinging to the tiniest bumps and ridges, or holding fast with suckered tentacles where no such imperfections presented. The climb was steep, though, and there was no banister, just the edges of the stairwell groove itself, wobbling up and down from ankle to shoulder height and back again as it passed through the tallowy features of the rock face. Above, the stars winked and glittered through postsunset haze and burnt-orange smog—glittered in precisely the way they never had on Bruno’s tiny planet, with its too-low, too-thin atmosphere.
“Invigorating,” he said, relishing the feeling of being truly outdoors, on a real planet, for the first time in years. The cool wind alone was a new, freshly real sensation as it puffed through his beard, pulled his hair aside in streamers, fluttered at the brim of his hat.
“Yeah, whatever,” Marlon muttered beside him. Tamra grunted something unintelligible in a similar tone as her guards clanked along beside her.
The first hundred meters seemed trivial enough, and the second hundred, but halfway through the third he detected Tamra’s voice well behind him, and turned to see her dropping wearily, setting one buttock down on the edge of a tall stair. She looked at him half plaintively, half commandingly.
“Keep climbing like that, and you’re going to send someone home in a cast,” she said.
He grunted, with mingled amusement and annoyance. Rolling injured limbs in foamed plastic was pure hyperbole; nobody treated fractures that way anymore. Why bother, when the injured party could simply be hurled into the nearest fax, murdered, disassembled, and replaced with a perfect—and perfectly healed—duplicate who’d thank you for the service? But as a figure of speech, Bruno grasped it implicitly: he was somehow in charge of this expedition, somehow responsible for all who followed behind him, and he was failing to take proper care. Everyone was healthy these days, well muscled and aerobically fit. Faxware saw to that. But that wasn’t quite the same, he reflected, as actual exercise, which after all got one used to a certain amount of hardship and strain. He supposed all those walks around the world had done some good after all.
Beside him, Marlon appeared hale enough, if a bit flushed and pink against the white of his jacket. But he saw that Rodenbeck and the Kroghs had overtaken Tamra, and behind her along the snaking stairway were strewn what must surely be the party’s entire guest list, in varying stages of fatigue. Some looked fit, eager, though reluctant to crowd past the Queen on her resting stair, or the halberd-bearing robots looming on the steps immediately above and below. Others, farther back, climbed more slowly and deliberately, and behind them lay a great many who slogged with great heaviness, as if their feet were shod with iron, as if the Earthlike gravity of Venus were far more than they were accustomed to, but also as if this climb were a matter of strange importance to them, an historic event in which they were determined to take part. The news cameras, he saw, had also returned, zipping and buzzing around the invisible, two-hundred meter cordon.
He could almost hear the voices echoing back from some distant future: “I was there on Skadi Peak, when de Towaji climbed it to examine the Ring Collapsiter. You’ve seen recorded images, maybe saw it live on the network, but I was actually there.” The notion bothered Bruno for several reasons, first because it underscored this fame, this unseemly significance that dogged him always, whatever he did, and second because it presumed, axiomatically, that there was a future to look back from. That he would, in other words, fix the Ring Collapsiter, single-handedly saving the Queendom from its otherwise certain doom. What basis did they have for such an assumption? What right did they have to demand it of him, if not of themselves?
He wondered how eager and solicitous their faces would be if the blasted thing fell in. Plenty of time to worry, no doubt; the collapsium’s lattice holes would widen slowly at first, gobbling solar protons only occasionally, later perhaps a few neutrons. They’d play hell with the sun in the meantime, of course, ejecting flares, wreaking massive disturbances, creating localized zones of greatly increased density as solar matter crowded in around the holes but was not immediately swallowed. Would there be pockets of neutronium kicking around inside the convection zones? Settling in toward the core and then pulling the core in after them? Eventually, no doubt. Eventually.
“Marlon,” he said, “how long between chromopause penetration and total solar collapse?”
“Four months,” Sykes puffed without hesitation.
“Hmm.” Bruno placed his chin in his hand, thoughtfully, wishing again for a less distracting environment. He didn’t want to lead his fellow humans or absorb their admiration; he just wanted another look at the Ring Collapsiter, and some quiet time to think. “We’re only a quarter of the way up, you know,” he said to Tamra,
“I’ll make it,” she replied. “But I think a lot of us need to catch our breath.”
Looking down at the crowd behind her, he nearly said, “I didn’t ask them to come.” But he didn’t like the way that might sound on later repetition, so instead he raised his voice and called out, “We’ll rest for a few minutes, and then proceed more slowly.”
He watched the faces react to that, all the faces and bodies spilling out below him like the followers of some wise, all-knowing Moses. A mad prophet, yes, late of the wilderness; he should have let the ladies trim and color his hair after all. Grumpily, he sat.
A snowflake lit beside him
on the stone, failed to melt, and was whisked away again by the sighing wind. Strange, the rock didn’t feel that cold beneath his hands; the snow should have melted. In a sheltered corner, he spied a little pile of it, gathered there like dust. He stretched a hand out to touch it, found it dry and somewhat sharp. Not quite like coarse sand or tiny glass shards, but similar in some way to each.
“This isn’t snow,” he said, surprised, pinching a bit between his fingers and dropping it into his palm for examination.
“Snow?” Ernest Krogh asked, eight steps below him.
“It’s wellstone flake,” Rodenbeck called up from two steps farther down. “Also known as terraform ash. It sprouts reactive ions to strip ‘unwanted’ chemicals from the air, then settles out, changes composition, and sloughs the impurities off as solids to join the lithosphere. Then the wind carries it up again, and it starts all over. There are equivalent devices freeing oxygen and nitrogen from the rocks; it’s precisely the antagonist of nature: the geochemical cycle running in reverse.”
“Only much quicker,” Krogh added with a trace of smugness.
Bruno peered at the little crystals, so much like snowflakes. The design made immediate sense: maximum surface area for a given mass, to increase reaction space, to maximize the chemistry a single flake could perform. How many were needed to change a whole planet? What fraction were really lifted into the sky again, after settling to earth? He imagined dunes of the stuff piling up here and there, strange geological strata for future generations to ponder. An immortal society could afford to be patient, but still it was no wonder this enterprise was short of cash. A small enterprise, yes, compared with shipping neutronium all the way up to the Kuiper Belt. But that didn’t make it easy, or cheap.
“We could just love Venus on her own merits,” Rodenbeck said, in weary, futile rebuttal. “Attacking her isn’t compulsory. You’re the worst sort of real-estate developer, you know; a sanctimonious one.”
Krogh laughed. “Son, when you buy a planet, I promise to let you care for it as you choose. No one will dream of stopping you. But the shareholders of Venus have voted, almost unanimously, to alter it. Most of us live here after all, or plan to, and while we don’t desire a second Earth, we do at least hope for homesteads that won’t rust and implode the moment we erect them. You know very little of our hardships here.”
“Yeah, yeah, poor baby. You knew the conditions when you moved here.”
“Hush, you two,” Rhea Krogh said, with a sort of long-suffering amusement.
Other conversations drifted upward, along with some coughs and wheezes.
“If you’re having trouble breathing,” Rhea called down, “do please go back inside. Her Majesty can’t take responsibility for the way I’d feel if anything happened.”
No one took her up on the offer.
“At the very least, go fax yourself an oxygen tank and some filters.”
A few responded to that, turning around the way they had come, their steps a little lighter in descent. Bruno let a few more minutes go by, giving them every chance, before rising to his feet once more and resuming the climb at a much-reduced pace and with many backward glances.
Leadership, iconhood, bah. Was it so wrong, simply wanting to do his work? Was that so grave a trespass on the rights of humanity? Humanity certainly seemed to think so. Could everyone be wrong but himself? Was that a reasonable thought to entertain? They trusted his opinion with regard to collapsium, why not with regard to himself? Perhaps, after all, they knew something he didn’t. Or perhaps, as with the collapsiter grid, their need simply outweighed any cautions or caveats, outweighed Bruno’s own desires. The good of the many demands the sacrifice of the able, yes?
The worst of it was that he had no role models, no historical personages from whom to draw example. Wealthy, strong, well connected to the seats of power; there’d been many like that, some of them even philosophers and inventors, the Declarant-equivalents in their respective eras. But none of them immortal, none forced to live eternally with the consequences of their actions. How paralyzing would they have found it, the eyes of history always on them, not for the sake of posterity but for on-going and literally ceaseless dissection? Knowing that their adolescent bumblings would look ridiculous even to their future selves, and worse, that such adolescence would never end?
Perhaps some could have managed it. Perhaps some would manage it in the far future, with Bruno’s failed example to look back on. But that didn’t help him now, didn’t show him how to be this flawless philosopher-saint of society’s expectation.
Bah. Bah! Better to worry about the collapsium, about the physics underlying it, and the universe underlying that, and the arc de fin that might somehow make sense of it all. That should be his historical role! That!
But his opinion mattered little; tonight he was a mountain guide, leading idle stargazers to their latest amusement. Well, not amusement; not that. Their lives did hinge on the fate of the Ring Collapsiter, after all. And they didn’t know how to fix it, and they thought perhaps he did; they were therefore understandably eager for his answer. So perhaps there was nothing strange about any of this, no reason for his ire or discomfort. Had he been harsh, foolish? Probably, yes.
So his thoughts had come full circle, and every time someone coughed or stumbled or demanded a rest on that long, slow climb, the circle began anew, starting and ending in the same places like a stuck recording, belying the myth that Bruno’s mind was extraordinary, somehow elevated above the norm. Bruno’s mind was, in point of fact, messier than his living room, crowded with lusts and irrationalities and stuck recordings beyond number. It was a wonder he accomplished anything at all.
But he engaged Marlon Sykes in sporadic conversation, when certain non-useless thoughts occurred to him. He looked up and down, as the mountain slowly grew beneath them and shrank above. He tugged his beard, pinched his chin, even fretted periodically about the Ring Collapsiter’s fall, and how it might be averted. F=ma, obviously, and by corollary, F=ea/c2. Did that help? If so, it wasn’t apparent.
Finally, the summit approached, the sky widening above and below them. It was unsettling, the way the sky never changed. The hazes drifted slowly in the jet stream, yes, but the post-sunset colors that lit them refused to deepen, to lose the last hints of red, to fade to blue and then darkness. The stars refused to really come out. There was no moon, and beneath the gloomy cloud deck below them, it was easy to imagine nothingness: Venus a planet of pure sky with no solid surface at all except this mountain, rising up like a pillar from the depths.
The staircase widened at the last, doubling and tripling its breadth before opening, finally, to a flattened, roughly circular depression at Skadi’s summit, some thirty meters across. The rock into which it was sunk formed a waist-high wall all around, broken by sheets into rough-smooth pastry layers. To the southwest, the twilight was brighter; Bruno hurried in that direction, crowding up against the wall, looking out toward the sun, hidden by miles of cloud and miles more of rock.
And there, standing nearly vertical in the sunset glow, was the Ring Collapsiter, barely visible as a filament of blue-green Cerenkov light, not quite a line but the peak of an arch; two very fine lines rising together to join at the top. Like the stars themselves, too small and distant to see as objects; this was a sort of stretched pinpoint, a brightness without dimension, but not without structure. Marlon’s promised crenellations were quite apparent, though subtle: little scallopy waves in the smoothness of the ring, and smaller waves scalloping those, placing each of the structure’s millions of collapsons into one of gravity’s infinitely many vibrational nodes, making it a stable, eternal structure. In theory.
Again, he was struck by the beauty of the thing, by the sheer elegance of function cast into form. Would future generations perceive its marvel, its grace? Would it slide into mundanity, one more work of engineering fading into civilization’s background, like cabling and sewer pipes? The very thought made him angry.
And the
n it struck him: he was doing it too, presuming a future for this thing, for the people whose lives it threatened. He, too, presumed unconsciously that this problem would be solved. And that was interesting, because he’d never presumed, for example, that the Earth could be towed to a warmer orbit to thaw its frozen regions, or that wellstone iron could magically change to atomic iron, or that one fine day, people would all cease being rotten to each other. Bruno prided himself on a good sense of which problems were and weren’t tractable, and this one—the fall of the Ring Collapsiter—apparently passed the test.
So what did his subconscious know that he himself did not? What had it been doing, while he was off barfing into cups and whatnot?
“There it is,” Marlon Sykes said, pointing vaguely. “In all its glory. You can even see Her Majesty’s superreflectors, little white dots all around.”
Bruno peered, squinted, and decided Marlon was right. The pinpoints were faint, much fainter than the collapsium itself. They were yellow-white, like sunlight, and they hovered outside the ring at various distances, sunlight pushing them away as fast as they could be lowered into place. In fact, a few of the more distant dots were moving with just-barely-perceptible speed.
“Hmm,” Bruno agreed. “Yes. Interesting. How big are the sheets?”
“Not large. A hundred meters.”
“Hmm,” Bruno said again, nodding slowly and pinching his chin. “Enough to wrap around the torus, like tape around the rim of a steering wheel. Goodness, if the ring were solid, we’d have no problem, would we?”
And then the world stopped. He drew a slow, reeking breath, filling his lungs, and then released it slowly, loudly, in an extended sigh. Because that was it. Because by God, that was bloody well it.
“They’re wellstone sheets?” he asked excitedly. “Thin and flexible, but able to be rigidized quickly?”
